Political Scene: Libya’s Future and Obama’s Foreign Policy

Libya is in for a “messy transition,” Steve Coll says on this week’s Political Scene podcast, “and I don’t expect a particularly exemplary government to come out of it.” But there’s reason for hope:

It’s got a small population—about 6.4 million people—and an enormous bounty of oil wealth. There’s a hundred billion dollars offshore in frozen assets alone. I was doing the math last night, that’s about ten thousand dollars per Libyan. Now, that’s a lot of incentive to calm down and try to organize and sort out disagreements peacefully, especially when the international community is going to be so attentive to this transition and supportive of it.

Wendell Steavenson, who has written about Egypt and Syria for the magazine, joins Coll and the host, Dorothy Wickenden, to discuss other upheavals around the Arab world and beyond. “The instability factor is not a small one in people’s mind,” Steavenson says. When she was reporting in Syria, she says, she “found the atmosphere indescribably tense, fearful, paranoid, shut down.” Syrians, she observed, are stuck in a “just get me through today” mindset.

Here in America, though, we have an eye on 2012. Coll says that the Obama Administration can be judged by its involvement abroad. How’s it looking? In Iraq: “On their way.” Afghanistan: “Highly uncertain.” Libya: “Seem to have achieved their goals.”